Then there came a
south rain and a thaw, and Barney went to the swamp and worked two
days knee-deep in melting snow. Then there was a morning when he
awoke as if on a bed of sharp knives, and lay alone all day and all
that night, and all the next day and that night, not being able to
stir without making the knives cut into his vitals.
Barney lay there all that time, and his soul became fairly bound into
passiveness with awful fetters of fiery bone and muscle; sometimes he
groaned, but nobody heard him. The last night he felt as if his whole
physical nature was knitting about him and stifling him with awful
coils of pain. The tears rolled over his cheeks. He prayed with
hoarse gasps, and he could not tell if anybody heard him. A dim light
from a window in the Barnard house on the hill lay into the kitchen
opposite his bedroom door. He thought of Charlotte, as if he had been
a child and she his mother. The maternal and protecting element in
her love was all that appealed to him then, and all that he missed or
wanted. "Charlotte, Charlotte," he mumbled to himself with his
parched, quivering lips.
At noon the next day Cephas Barnard came home from the store; he had
been down to buy some molasses. When he entered his kitchen he set
the jug down on the table with a hard clap, then stood still in his
wet boots.
Sarah and Charlotte were getting dinner, both standing over the
stove.
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